LITMIR.BIZ

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Puzzlement entered Dora’s voice as she turned to where her daughter had stood only moments ago. “Where did you go? I want someone to meet you.”

      Kelsey didn’t respond. Protected by six feet of wall, she was too busy closing her eyes, shaking her head and wishing her mom wasn’t so impossibly social. Dora Schaeffer had never met a stranger. Any tourist who came in more than once was remembered, along with where they were from and where they were going. She also knew every resident for a radius of fifty miles. If she didn’t know them personally, she knew of them, about them and who they were related to—along with most of their business. People tended to confide in her and what they didn’t confide, she overheard or pried out on her own. It was widely rumored that between her, Agnes Waters at the general store and Claire McGraw, the mayor’s wife, there was hardly a secret in town.

      The only person her mom didn’t know as well as she thought she did was her own daughter.

      There were advantages to that small failing. In a matter of seconds, it became apparent that she’d never had a clue about her daughter’s wild crush on the man watching her reluctantly step back into view. Her mom didn’t even seem to think she knew who Sam was.

      “Kelsey, this is Tom and Janelle Collier’s nephew, Sam. He’s taking time off to work on the old Baker place for his sister.” The arches of her pale eyebrows merged. “I told you the Bakers finally sold the place, didn’t I? After Jenny married Doctor Reid?

      “Anyway,” she hurried on, sounding as if she didn’t want to sidetrack herself as she turned back to the man quietly watching her strangely silent daughter, “Kelsey is helping out through the holiday, like I told you.” Holding her casted arm protectively at her waist, she set a napkin and utensils on the counter for him. “I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t been able to make it. It’s just us locals and a few lowlanders on vacation out at the lakes right now, but give it two days and that road out there will be bumper-to-bumper with folk coming to celebrate the Fourth of July. They’re all going to be hungry, too.”

      He had big hands. Kelsey noticed that as he wrapped one around his mug. He had a nice smile, too. A little reserved. Kind of sexy.

      He was smiling at her. Feeling an odd jolt join her panic, she jerked her attention to the older man pouring more maple syrup over the melted butter on his pancakes.

      “Good thing you had her to call on, Dora,” Amos informed her mom. “You’d have been up a creek with Betsy being gone like she is. You thinkin’ to hire somebody to help her when she gets back?” He aimed his fork at her cast. “Leastwise until you get rid of that thing?”

      Not by a hair did her mom’s tight bun budge as she adamantly shook her head. “Betsy will take her shifts and I’ll take mine,” she insisted, speaking of her part-time cook, and new grandmother of twins. The birth of those babies had required Betsy Parker’s presence in Burlington to help her daughter and son-in-law—right through the busiest week of summer.

      “I just need to get used to this thing,” Dora muttered, frowning stubbornly at her encumbrance. “Once the crowds are gone this weekend I’ll be fine. In the meantime, I’ll have Kelsey freeze me up a bunch of pies and such in case Betsy needs more time with those babies.”

      The frown melted as she glanced back at Sam. “You used to come in here when Kelsey was in high school,” she reminded him, returning to what she’d rather talk about. “When she wasn’t in the kitchen, she waited tables for me. You might remember having seen her back then.”

      Kelsey knew her mom was just being her usual chatty self. As far as the older woman was concerned, her little diner was her home and her guests were treated with the same hospitality she would have offered had they been in her living room—which, technically, they were. The entire first floor of the old two-story house Kelsey had been raised in had been converted into the diner after her father passed away twenty years ago. She and her mom had lived in the rooms upstairs. Her mom still did.

      Since Dora was just being her gregarious self, Kelsey ordinarily wouldn’t have thought anything of her mom’s casual comments. But having her mom prod Sam’s memory was the last thing she wanted her to do—until she realized he seemed to have no memory of her at all.

      “Sure,” he said, in that vague way people did when they didn’t want to be rude and say they had little or no recollection of a person. “Your mom said that you live in Scottsdale now. You’re a chef?”

      “Pastry chef,” she explained, because it was all she could think to say.

      A hint of a smile tugged at his mouth again. “I’m an apple pie man myself. Will you make any of those while you’re here?”

      “Probably.”

      Watching her over the steam rising over the rim of his mug, he arched one dark eyebrow. “Are you any good at pancakes?”

      She was having trouble maintaining eye contact with him. She couldn’t remember specifics, but she was pretty certain that many of the entries in that diary had do with his beautifully muscled body. Those muscles looked as hard as the granite mined from the quarry outside of town and radiated a fine sort of tension that made him seem more restive than relaxed.

      The fact that he was making her feel the same way wasn’t lost on her, either. “I can manage.”

      “He always has a full stack, four eggs over medium, wheat toast and two sides of bacon,” her mom rattled off, moving from behind the counter to wait on a couple of tourists who’d wandered in with their two offspring. “Sit anywhere you’d like,” she told them, then glanced over her shoulder at Sam. “You want buttermilk or blueberry?”

      That reserved smile surfaced again. Looking at Kelsey, he said, “She can surprise me.”

      Realizing she was staring at his mouth, praying he hadn’t noticed, Kelsey spun away. She used to practice kissing that beautifully carved mouth on her bedroom mirror.

      With a mental groan at the memory, she snatched up a clean stainless steel bowl. With the last batch of pancake batter gone, she needed to mix another.

      She couldn’t believe how totally flustered she felt. She was twenty-nine years old. Not sixteen. In the eleven years since she’d left Maple Mountain for culinary school, she’d worked her way from a line chef in Boston to master pastry chef in four-star restaurants in San Diego and Scottsdale. She had managed to survive the artistic temperaments of male executive chefs who considered themselves God’s gift to man, woman and culinary creativity, and placed in the top three of every dessert competition she’d entered in the last five years. Until two minutes ago—three minutes were she to count from the moment she’d heard Sam’s name—her biggest concern had been the terrible timing of her mom’s need for her to come home.

      She had just been offered the position of executive pastry chef where she worked at the Regis-Carlton resort in Scottsdale. She had also been offered the same position with a high-end new restaurant by Doug Westland, one of the most respected and innovative restaurateurs on the West Coast, along with the opportunity to become his business—and bed—partner. She had huge issues with the latter part of that arrangement. But that wasn’t the problem at the moment. Or the point. The point was that she was highly organized, disciplined, creative in her own right and that she was not easily unsettled. Normally.

      Scooping a cup of the flour, baking powder and salt she’d premeasured earlier, she folded it into the eggs and buttermilk, gently so as not to make the batter heavy. She felt decidedly unsettled now.

      That circumstance no doubt explained why she didn’t feel at all slighted to know that Sam apparently hadn’t even noticed her existence the summer he’d occupied her nearly every waking thought. Realizing he barely remembered her was actually a relief. A huge one. So was the thought that nothing about his manner indicated that he’d discovered her daring and imaginative writings, much less read them. To the best of her knowledge, she was the only Kelsey in Maple Mountain. With her name on the diary’s cover, it seemed that had he found it, she would have at least rated a raised eyebrow when

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